Summer Sensations: School Yourself in Fish Tacos

Is there anything more festive than tacos for dinner? Well, yes: fish tacos for dinner. The traditional Mexican staple — spiced meat balanced delicately with fillings in a small tortilla — got amped up immensely in the Baja region, where plentiful shoreline and its attendant seafood made fish tacos a natural mash-up. And while your standard ground-meat taco is pretty much the same wherever you go, fish tacos come in a seemingly endless array of options, running the gamut from light n’ healthy to fried n’ festive.

This fresh, flavorful, summer-house-worthy entree makes for a terrific lunch or dinner, and can be made on the stovetop or the grill. Whatever fruits and vegetables are fresh can be pressed into service for toppings. And since you can build fish tacos yourself using as much or as little of any ingredient as you like (and you eat them with your fingers!), kids flock to them like little minnows.

We’ve gathered some of our favorite fish tacos here, and have a particular fondness for the fusion-y versions — with an Asian influence, for instance, or a Caribbean flair. And who’s the genius that thought of adding tequila to the mix? We’d like to shake his hand. Right after we’re done with our taco, that is.